1,300 improvements and counting…

A year of development and we’ve only just got started!

Ever heard of Trello? It’s an amazingly simple organisation tool, based on the kanban approach of process management – whereby tasks are visualised on ‘cards’ and contained within ‘lists’. To manage different projects, or separate workflows, these lists can be stuck to ‘boards’. The journey these cards make between lists – travelling from left to right (via drag & drop) – represents the progression of each task from Idea through to Implementation. Combined with custom tags, attachments, screenshots and the ability to assign cards to users, this becomes a powerful team collaboration tool which is commonly used in software development, but can be applied to almost any industry or specialism.

Oh, and the best part – it’s free. Which as any prudent startup owner will confirm, is the perfect companion to functional. Add to this the ability to customise your Trello experience with Google Chrome extensions, and it becomes clear how they managed to sell for $425 million to Atlassian after just three years of incorporation.

We use Trello religiously. Looking back, I found out that today marks exactly one year since we posted our first card on our shiny new Trello board; oblivious to the benefits this was going to add to our development process. Every single feature we’ve added, every single bug we’ve fixed, and every single customer development request just itching to be developed is stored and organised to keep a complete log of our progress over the last year.

Using one of those Chrome extensions I referred to above, I can quickly see that we’ve developed and released exactly 1,300 items over the last 365 days. These range from editing a few typos, fixing a few hundred ‘Yellow Screens of Death’ during development testing, to adding Automatic Contract Generation functionality and most recently – yesterday in fact – bulk upload of half-hourly data (which, incidentally, we’re really excited about. Sad, I know).

But what about the future? What have we got planned? 244 cards sit in our Development board. 38 of these are already developed and in testing for our next software update. Another 22 are on the priority list – fully scoped and waiting patiently in line to be actioned. Most of these are driven by our customers’ requests, and the daily feedback we receive which completes the validation loop we have always followed as a business.

We’re not here to make promises we can’t keep. We’re here to build software, and continually improve the products we offer to help brokers do business. Give me a call if you’d like to know more about our process – I love talking about it, as you can probably tell!

About the author

Rod Westwood

Rod’s industry experience stems from a decade working in business consultancy specialising in the global oil & gas industry. During this time, he has provided commercial and market expertise to support finance raising and equity investments totalling in excess of $10 billion for clients in more than 50 countries. His passion for technology & energy go hand in hand in the development of the UtilityClick software platform.